Exhibition

Photographs as Letters explores the exchange of photographic materials sent through postal mail among twentieth-century American photographic communities. Drawn primarily from the Center for Creative Photography Archive the exhibition presents a range of photographic correspondence that lends insight into the working processes and networks of some of the United States’ most significant photographers. From finished fine prints to intentionally altered working materials, from postcards to print scraps and other darkroom castoffs, Photographs as Letters will afford visitors an opportunity to see the ways that members of American photographic communities have communicated and collaborated through postal mail.

Twentieth-century American photographer Ansel Adams famously said that the photographic negative is like a composer’s score, and the print a performance.  Drawn from the Ansel Adams Archive, at the Center for Creative Photography, housed in Tucson at the University of Arizona, this exhibition illustrates Adams’s meaning.  Throughout the exhibition of sixty photographs, sets of prints—grouped in twos and threes—show how on different occasions Adams created varying interpretations from his own negatives. These groups demonstrate how, using the same score, Adams was constantly revising the way it was performed.

Comparing and contrasting more than one print from the same negative demonstrates Adams’s choices about cropping, dodging and burning, and overall contrast and brightness. The wealth of material from the Adams Archive also reveals how, over time, his approach to certain negatives changed as his perspective evolved, the field transformed, and the available materials shifted. Above all, these comparisons show that Adams invested time and care in each hand-made print, producing interpretive artworks that come as much from his imagination as from the landscapes before which he stood. All of the exhibition’s prints, spanning the master’s six-decade career, highlight Adams’s particular talent and sensitivity as a photographic printer.

Many of the artworks are accompanied by quotations from Adams’s published writings, in which he discussed his process for an image. The photographer was known for his role as an educator and promoter of the photographic medium as an expressive artform, and he enthusiastically shared his techniques through workshops, journal articles, and publications. This presentation invites you to explore, through Adams’s body of work, the practice of black-and-white printmaking, and the range of expression a skilled photographer can create with this most fundamental of photographic processes. 

Ansel Adams’s long photographic career saw a significant shift in style between his early work, made between 1916 and 1941, and his most recognizable production, from 1941 through the end of his life in 1984. The catalyst for this change was a commission from the federal government: in 1941 Adams was hired by the Department of the Interior to make photographs of the national parks as part of a mural project to adorn the new Interior building in Washington D.C. He was honored to be hired for a project of such importance and personal significance. With the broad American public in mind as his audience, he set out on a trip through the Western United States to picture the country’s dramatic protected lands. 

Although the large-scale murals were not completed in Adams’s lifetime, the project had a huge impact on the photographer: the style he adopted for the national parks commission became his signature, characterizing much of his artwork for the rest of his life. He was so invested in taking pictures of America’s national parks that in the late 1940s he applied for, and received, a Guggenheim fellowship to continue documenting spectacular wilderness places after the funding for the initial commission ran out.

This exhibition presents twenty-two photographs, illustrating three elements in his body of work: his signature style, the shift in style in 1941, and his commercial work. His signature style will be shown through later works and national parks pictures made either for the mural project or on his Guggenheim fellowship which exhibit characteristic elements. Pairs and groupings of works that contrast early and later works will track the shift in his style. And finally examples of his commercial photography, a little known but important component of his career, illustrate the development of his artistic language.

In 1941, famed Modernist photographer Edward Weston embarked upon an epic cross-country road trip to create what would become his last major body of work: a suite of photographs made to accompany a luxury edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Whereas Whitman considered his poems to be photographic, in that they presented a clear and truthful picture of his subjects, Weston wanted his photographs to be poetic – rather than simply illustrate Whitman’s text.

Weston’s photographs are presented in dialogue with recent acquisitions or lesser-known, never-before-exhibited works from the Center for Creative Photography’s permanent collection. The Heritage Gallery honors the Center’s founders while presenting a continuum of photographic practice across time.

Late in his life, in response to persistent public interest in how his images were made, Ansel Adams published Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs. The book, which attempted to answer a question Adams’ was frequently asked, “How did you make this photograph?”, delves into the circumstances surrounding all aspects of the famed photographer’s image-making process. In it, Adams provides background to how he came to make certain images, outlines his thought process, and provides technical details related to each photograph. A mixture of Adams’ most iconic works, as well as lesser-known pictures, “Examples” delivers an insightful look into the photographer’s work and process.

Taking the book as its template Ansel Adams: Examples draws upon the Center for Creative Photography’s collection of Adams’ work to realize the premise of “Examples” with original prints and archival materials. Paired with text from the book, written by Adams himself, the exhibition affords viewers and unprecedented opportunity to familiarize themselves with the intricacies of Adams’ work.

The Center for Creative Photography and the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona are delighted to collaborate to exhibit a captivating project by B.A. Van Sise in a celebration of the bicentennial of Walt Whitman’s birth. Van Sise is a New York–based photographer with a lifelong love of poetry and a family lineage that traces back to seminal American poet Walt Whitman. Van Sise has undertaken an expansive and inventive poetry portraiture project. Beginning in 2015, he embarked on a quest to make portraits of American poets that reflect the diversity and vitality of today’s poetry scene. Each portrait is a creative endeavor in which the poet becomes more an actor than a model, performing a concept Van Sise has created based upon one of the author’s poems. These narratives sometimes relate closely to the text (which is presented alongside the photograph), while at other times the connection is more abstract. The resulting “portraits” are at once a likeness of the poet, an evocation of the poem, and a presentation of a visual narrative fashioned by the photographer. 

The exhibition features one video portrait (of acclaimed poet Sharon Olds) and about 80 photographs showcasing the breadth of American poetry today, including a who’s who of Pulitzer Prize winners, Poet Laureates, and Chancellors of the Academy of American Poetry. In the Center’s Heritage Gallery, adjacent to A Portrait of Poetry, related materials from the Center’s collection are shown to complement Van Sise’s ambitious project.

Drawn from the Richard Avedon collection at the Center for Creative Photography, Richard Avedon: Relationships presents eighty portrait and fashion photographs – ranging from the 1950s to the early 2000s – including examples of Avedon’s large-scale prints. The exhibition will explore three kinds of “relationships” in Avedon’s life and work: the interactions between the figures within the frame, the partnerships Avedon formed with longstanding subjects, and importantly, the relationship between Richard Avedon and the Center for Creative Photography.

Avedon’s works, which he personally selected for donation to the Center, enrich the collection through the importance of the subjects he photographed, the widespread circulation of his images through publication, Avedon’s unique and influential photographic approach, and his blurring of the line between artistic and commercial production. The exhibition will feature film footage and related documents to tell the story of Avedon’s choice to invest in the Center as a recipient of his photographs, and will explore the range of photographs he gifted to the institution.

Save the date for Avedon programming!

Presentation by Dennita Sewell, the Jacquie Dorrance Curator of Fashion Design for the Phoenix Art Museum - Thursday, April 18, 6:00 PM

Publication Sponsor: Tim Hagyard, Long Realty

Media Partner: Tucson Lifestyle Magazine

Inspired by the Center’s legacy, the Heritage Gallery features iconic treasures from the collection alongside more recent acquisitions. The story of the Center is told through pairings and groupings of images that explore the relationships between contemporary practice and the photographic foundations that inspired them. The gallery will be rotated twice a year, offering visitors a chance to make new discoveries, sparking inquiry and dialogue. 

The first iteration of the Heritage Gallery features work by Ansel Adams, David Maisel, Patrick Nagatani, Lynn Stern, Giorgia Valli, Edward Weston and Garry Winogrand.

Longer Ways to Go: Photography of the American Road delves deep into the complex dialogue that photography can enter into with a subject dear to many. This exhibition explores the symbiotic relationship between photography and the folklore of the American highway, including the emblematic Route 66. Longer Ways juxtaposes photographs from different eras, exploring themes related to travel, ideals of small-town life, the national heritage of westward expansion, and personal freedom. This exhibition made its debut at the Phoenix Art Museum, and comes to the Center’s Gallery in an expanded form with new photographs and acquisitions.

The exhibition was inspired by a body of photographs of Route 66 by Kōzō Miyoshi, a Japanese photographer and former artist in residence at the Center for Creative Photography. Taken in the 1990s, Miyoshi’s photographs of Route 66 are complex, even ambivalent in tone. Rather than re-creating the Route 66 of historical imagination, his photographs show both the areas of 66 that have managed to survive through ingenuity and the once-iconic sites that have fallen into disrepair. Miyoshi’s works embody a construction of American identity that is becoming increasingly self-referential; they suggest the landmark’s transition from highway to scenic byway, from America to Americana. 

Alongside Miyoshi’s photographs, Longer Ways to Go features a diverse selection from the vast photographic body documenting the image of the American road. Chronologically, Longer Ways to Go begins with works by Depression-era photographers including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein, and extends to the present day. The exhibition also features work by Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Robert Frank, Gary Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Danny Lyon, Ed Ruscha, Joe Deal, Stephen Shore, Richard Avedon, Richard Misrach, Christopher Churchill and scott b. davis.

The works will be organized thematically, covering topics such as the view of nature from a car window and the cult of the automobile. These depictions investigate the extent to which American identity has a sometimes fraught, but always significant, relationship with the idea and practice of the open road. Longer Ways to Go suggests that not only does travel reflect cultural habits of consumption and leisure; the meaning with which we imbue it speaks to something deep and ineffable within American self-construction.

The exhibition has a companion page featuring current views of many of the locations in which the exhibition photographs were taken. Visit it here. 

CCP Road Trip!

We'd love to see your road trip photos! Tag us @cntforcreativephoto and use #MywaytogoCCP to share your snaps.

Ansel Adams famously said that the photographic negative is like a composer’s score, and the print a performance.  As home of the Ansel Adams Archive, the Center is uniquely positioned to illustrate Adams’s meaning.  This exhibition of twenty-four photographs will feature sets of prints—grouped in twos and threes—that show how on different occasions Adams created varying interpretations from his own negatives.  The exhibition will also feature a small selection of prints that span the master’s six-decade career to highlight Adams’s particular talent and sensitivity as a photographic printer.

Comparing and contrasting more than one print from the same negative demonstrates Adams’s choices about cropping, dodging and burning, and overall contrast and brightness.  Above all, these comparisons show that Adams invested time and care in each hand-made print, producing interpretive artworks that come as much from his imagination as from the landscapes before which he stood. 

The exhibition will open in conjunction with the Center’s celebration of Adams’s birthday on Friday, February 16 and Saturday, February 17. Learn more here